Skylight Application Performance Analysis Capabilities

What is Skylight Application Performance Analysis Capabilities?

100% of application transactions and databases measured in real time

Skylight tracks all transactions and calculates the performance metrics for each application running on the network. Skylight displays the performance of each application flow and provides the ability to refine searches using a wide variety of filters: per application, by client and/or server IP addresses, by protocol stack, and by network flows or zones, among others.

Skylight displays reports and visualizes all data from the analyzed cables in interactive tables and charts without requiring any configuration.

Skylight comes with advanced port-independent protocol identification (PIPI) capabilities, plus hundreds of pre-configured applications and services, making it fully autonomous. New application or service protocols can be defined or cataloged with just a few clicks.

Network performance

Skylight devices capture all traffic on their interfaces, whether IPv4, IPv6, or non-IP streams. Each network flow is analyzed and a comprehensive variety of TCP transport metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is calculated to report the detailed integrity of network communications.

Skylight displays performance data through a variety of dashboards. Charts, tables, and arrays make it easy to access each information, enabling IT professionals to instantly identify the most important performance values across the network infrastructure and application chain. With contextual click, fault domains are easily identified by viewing related applications and protocols.

Name services

Skylight analyzes name resolution transactions for the most common network protocols: DNS, NetBIOS, WINS, mDNS, etc. This enables IT professionals to identify a variety of performance issues perceived by end users, such as configuration issues on the DNS server or client or application sides.

HTTP / HTTPS

Skylight has a dedicated module for measuring and analyzing the performance of Web applications using HTTP or HTTPS protocols.

In addition to measuring individual hit rates and response times, Skylight also reports full page load schedules. Skylight can retain HTTP requests and their responses for in-depth analysis. The number and typology of HTTP errors are captured to simplify the troubleshooting of application performance issues. Skylight also has an SSL decryption module that allows you to decode secure HTTPS transactions - for complete visibility into all web transactions - and their performance attributes.

SQL databases

Skylight analyzes database performance from a purely passive perspective, without the need to deploy a software agent or change server configuration parameters. Skylight automatically identifies and captures SQL transactions from the most popular databases, measuring their performance and displaying information relevant for diagnostic purposes. This includes response times, presence of errors, actual SQL queries, and several other metrics. The full details of each SQL database request are available in Skylight at the click of a mouse.

File transfers - CIFS / SMB

Network users and applications are constantly transferring a large number of files. Any problem or slowness in transferring files will typically result in many user complaints. With Skylight, IT professionals gain full visibility into which user is accessing which resource and at what level of performance. Skylight supports CIFS and SMB protocols (v1 to v3) for file transfer analysis, including all metrics, status, and command details.

Citrix XenApp / XenDesktop

Identifying the cause of a Citrix performance issue can pose a real challenge because there are many different components and servers involved, with multiple dependencies between them.

Skylight provides unmatched visibility into Citrix's login and launch times, network usage, and application activity. Thanks to the detailed information provided at each network layer and across all application tiers, IT professionals can diagnose and resolve Citrix performance issues with just a few clicks. User experience KPIs cover login responsiveness, time to start applications, and network and server resource consumption.

VoIP

Skylight measures the Quality of Service (QoS) of VoIP call flows, with support for the following VoIP protocols: SIP, Cisco Skinny, and MGCP. For each VoIP call, Skylight records the conversation details, the parties involved, and the duration of the call. It also mediatises call quality by reporting the Mean Opinion Score Score (MOS), along with network deficiencies that affect it, such as jitter, latency, and loss.

ICMP Analysis

In addition to performance measurements, Skylight also displays all network streams that are in an error state. Skylight can successfully identify any device that is trying to access a non-existent network device or that is not responding to a requested service. This can be particularly useful in identifying devices that are using an outdated or incorrect configuration.

System requirements:

CPU: 1.8 GHz dual core processor

RAM: 2 GB

HDD / SSD: 50 GB of free space on the main drive

Operating system: Microsoft Windows 8 32-bit, Microsoft Windows 7 32-bit and Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit

Resolution: 1024×768